“CNN has learned from sources familiar with the experiment…”
Don’t you just love articles starting off like that. That means some creep in government got the reporter to sign an NDA in order to get the “story”.
Researchers who launched an experimental cyber attack caused a generator to self-destruct, alarming the federal government and electrical industry about what might happen if such an attack were carried out on a larger scale, CNN has learned.
Here’s the same nameless sources again:
Department of Homeland Security video shows a generator spewing smoke after a staged experiment. Sources familiar with the experiment said the same attack scenario could be used against huge generators that produce the country’s electric power.
I’m not going to repeat all the stupidity in the article. Just quote the only relevant paragraphs – which anyone coming to this site already knows:
“Several conditions have to be in place. … You first have to gain access to that individual control system. [It] has to be a control system that is vulnerable to this type of attack.”
“You have to have overcome or have not enacted basic security protocols that are inherent on many of those systems. And you have to have some basic understanding of what you’re doing. How the control system works and what, how the equipment works in order to do damage.
You can tell there’s an election in the offing. We’re supposed to be living in a state of perpetual fear.
#31, you are correct, these systems are suppose to be “air gapped” from the rest of the network. Unfortunately that is not the case in most locations. Many power companies think the “air gap” between 2 network cards on a single system is secure, it is not, it is just a gateway. And as I stated earlier, you still have modems connected inside the “EMS” network. Not to mention the default passwords in use, can anyone say foxboro? Myself and many in the security field have been yelling and complaining about these issues, but all we get are disbelievers, just like in this forum. Until you see this stuff done in person, remotely and undetected, one tends to think we are safe from this type of an attack.
#11 – the DBSM uses an inversely reactive adaptive scale whose normalization factor causes everything to evaluate to 7.72.